Everyone is a semiotician, because everyone is constantly unconsciously interpreting the meaning of signs around them – from traffic lights to colours of flags, the shapes of cars, the architecture of buildings, and the design of cereal packaging.
And signs don’t only need to be visual – they can be aural or sonic signs too, such as the sound of a police siren, usually heard before the vehicle is seen.
We know for instance that the following sign in the West means everything is OK. This can be dated back to its alleged use by Roman emperors to signal whether a gladiator would live (hence be OK). Its reverse – thumbs down – signified death.
But in scuba diving this sign means go up to the surface, and by the side of the road it means you want to hitch a ride.
In other words, we need to understand the context in which a sign is communicated in order to comprehend its real meaning, and hence act appropriately. What is going on around the sign is usually as important for us to know as the sign itself in order to interpret its meaning.
Semiotics is a key tool to ensure that intended meanings (of for instance a piece of communication or a new product) are unambiguously understood by the person on the receiving end. Usually there are good reasons if someone doesn’t understand the real intention of a message and semiotics can help unravel that confusion, ensuring clarity of meaning.
Semiotics started out as an academic investigation of the meaning of words (linguistics), it moved into examining people’s behaviour (anthropology and psychology), then evolved to become an enquiry into culture and society (sociology and philosophy), following that it moved onto assisting with analyses of cultural products (films, literature, art – critical theory), and finally and more recently became a methodology for researching and analysing consumer behaviour and brand communications.
It is from this social science background that Sign Salad emerged. We apply the high-level thinking of semiotics to enable clients to understand the commercial implications of the culture around their brands and its impact upon consumers. Ultimately, we assist with the development of culturally relevant brand strategies and meaningful communication (packaging, comms and point of sale).
We can look at signs and sign systems in three ways:
If syntactics is the formal relationship between signs in a sign system, then how might we read the syntax of traffic lights? We might see the relationships between red, amber, and green as three parts of a sign system that also refer to other sign systems (such as white lines on the road, or the shape of a stop sign). These sign relationship then make the structure of traffic lights as a sign system.
If pragmatics is the relationship between sign and reader, how might we pragmatically read the traffic light? If the light is red, for example, we know to stop.
Our actions and thoughts – what we do automatically – are often governed by a complex set of cultural messages and conventions, and dependent upon our ability to interpret them instinctively and instantly.
Codes are so important to the understanding of semiotics that, if a sign does not appear to conform to a code, there is doubt that it is even a sign at all. All codes are systems, but not all systems are codes. These codes are used by both encoders and decoders of signs to help ensure that the message intended is approximate to the message received. We often use contextual cues to let us know what kinds of codes are expected or to expect – for example, an academic textbook uses words and pictures differently than a children’s storybook. They both use signs in the form of words and drawings, but how we approach understanding these signs is quite different.
Some codes, we are quite aware of. For example, iambic pentameter is a form of poetry, which is a code system in which there are certain expectations about the arrangement of word-signs in regards to both their signified/meaning (imagery) and their signifier/structure (rhythm).
If you are most familiar with Western visual codification systems, you may not at first see the two faces. This is because, in Western culture familiar with still images, our codification system for such images tends to code darker areas as background in relation to lighter areas (with a few exceptions, related to symmetry and balance). This is how a lot of optical illusions are made, they actually exploit a learned code for visual perception. But such codes exist to account for every type of sign there is.
So in summary, semiotics is a powerful tool for helping to understand and interpret how meaning is constructed and deconstructed in messages. It is now worth stepping back and looking at how semiotics fits into the wider social patterns and ideologies.
- Semantics – this is the ‘how’ of semiotics, and is concerned with this relationship between a signified and signifier – the sign and what it stands in for.
- Syntactics – this refers to structural relations. One structural relation in language is grammar, but syntactics in semiotics refers to the formal relationship between signs that lets them build into sign systems.
- Pragmatics – pragmatics, according to Morris (Morris, 1938), is the relationship of sign to the person reading or understanding that sign.
If syntactics is the formal relationship between signs in a sign system, then how might we read the syntax of traffic lights? We might see the relationships between red, amber, and green as three parts of a sign system that also refer to other sign systems (such as white lines on the road, or the shape of a stop sign). These sign relationship then make the structure of traffic lights as a sign system.
If pragmatics is the relationship between sign and reader, how might we pragmatically read the traffic light? If the light is red, for example, we know to stop.
Our actions and thoughts – what we do automatically – are often governed by a complex set of cultural messages and conventions, and dependent upon our ability to interpret them instinctively and instantly.
Codes are so important to the understanding of semiotics that, if a sign does not appear to conform to a code, there is doubt that it is even a sign at all. All codes are systems, but not all systems are codes. These codes are used by both encoders and decoders of signs to help ensure that the message intended is approximate to the message received. We often use contextual cues to let us know what kinds of codes are expected or to expect – for example, an academic textbook uses words and pictures differently than a children’s storybook. They both use signs in the form of words and drawings, but how we approach understanding these signs is quite different.
Some codes, we are quite aware of. For example, iambic pentameter is a form of poetry, which is a code system in which there are certain expectations about the arrangement of word-signs in regards to both their signified/meaning (imagery) and their signifier/structure (rhythm).
If you are most familiar with Western visual codification systems, you may not at first see the two faces. This is because, in Western culture familiar with still images, our codification system for such images tends to code darker areas as background in relation to lighter areas (with a few exceptions, related to symmetry and balance). This is how a lot of optical illusions are made, they actually exploit a learned code for visual perception. But such codes exist to account for every type of sign there is.
So in summary, semiotics is a powerful tool for helping to understand and interpret how meaning is constructed and deconstructed in messages. It is now worth stepping back and looking at how semiotics fits into the wider social patterns and ideologies.
FireSigns: A Semiotic Theory for Graphic Design (Design Thinking, Design Theory)
by Steven Skaggs (Author), Ken Friedman (Author), Erik Stolterman (Author)
Summary:
- Histories and context formed graphic design to be its own art with a strong ideology and visual language
- modernism - a result of industrialism and the great war
- This became commercialised creating a corporate visual culture / semiotic language
- approaching a design problem with a broader sense of cultural and historical norms instead of working from within an inherent style
- Thus, we have an unspoken visual language that is associated within a design problem
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